No doubt to make up for our tiny weewees.
Yes there is. Broad-brushing birthed this thread and all of the thought behind it.
Amen. Outside of the SDMB and the occasional historic site I don’t remember the last time it came up (other than when I brought it up- usually in one of my genealogy lectures). It’s just really not that big a deal here. My father was an extremely garrulous historian and even he could rarely get a conversation going on the topic, and that was a quarter-century closer to the events. That’s why I’m always amazed when I hear how obsessed we are with the subject down here.
That said, I read an editorial a few months ago from a tourist complaining about the number of Confederates with statues in the U.S. Capitol (a list that includes Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Wade Hampton, and many lesser known generals and statesmen). The writer felt there was no place for traitors and believed the Congress should vote for their removal. Such notions irritate me because I put them on par with Stalin having photos edited- you can’t rechisel our history; I probably loathe Jefferson Davis with a more informed dislike than she had, but these statues were put there a century ago for the most part, people really don’t sacrifice virgins to them on their birthdays, and their selection was part of that state’s history. The notions of removing them are as ludicrous as that of carving Thomas Jefferson’s face into Ronald Reagan’s on Mt. Rushmore.
Past tense, Zoe, but within living memory. And extended by a hundred years. Anyone know anything about it? I recall vauge comments I’ve run into over the years, but nothing as specific as this.
About chain gangs? Well, I can tell you that chain gangs weren’t a race-based system. Plenty of white folks working in them, too.
Calling chain gangs an “extension of slavery” (as opposed to an exploitation of prisoners) is a real stretch.
Not about chain gangs in general, about the specific flavor as depicted in that article.
No, but we’ve been overrun by Oklahomans and Texans since the pipeline days.
Thank you, Zoe.
Actual mourning over the “Old South”, earnestly wishing it would return, is pretty much not done. And if it is, it’s highly marginalized.
Renting out chain gangs to factories and farms is definitely something that happened, but again, while exploitative, it was not race-based.
Same with mill villages and tenant farming. These weren’t race-based systems, though they certainly ensnared a lot of black people. There were plenty of poor whites being exploited for their labor as well.
I can’t speak to the other specifics of the article but it seems to me that the author of the book upon which it is based seems a little too eager to extrapolate from anecdotal evidence. Using instances of rented chain gangs to extrapolate a grand design to “extend slavery” seems more an effort to market a book than a cool-headed look at history, and it ignores the many white convicts and workers caught up in the same systems.
Obviously I don’t hear it when it’s not relevant to the subject. It’s not like random strangers on the streets of Cary come up to me and say “the South will rise again!” (Not least because chances are pretty good that a random person on the streets of Cary will be an Indian tech professional.) But when society or history are the topic, yeah, I do get a sense of wistfulness for glories past. Maybe it’s just that coming from Montana I don’t have any historical glories to mourn, but it does strike me.
I’ve said it before: One thing that surprised me when I came down here with an interest in history, is how much Revolutionary War history (and pre-RW history) there is. We never heard about it up North. But here’s what struck me as strange: You don’t hear much about it down here, either, and when you do, it’s more factual IMO, less “glorous cause.” IME, it’s not like the “Southern history = Civil War” assumption is limited to those in the North.
And I’ve also said this before: It’s not like I’ve personally made this up. I understand that you rightly object to stereotypes of the South that you make all of you sound stuck in the past, or worse. But those stereotypes do have a grain of truth to them. ISTM that in objecting to the gross distortions at one end of the spectrum, some of the Southerners here on the Board fly all the way to the other end of the spectrum, to “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” AND that you (not you personally, Zoe) get mighty damn over-sensitive about anything that you might take as a slur on your region.
I wasn’t born and raised here. I’m from the North. I can only tell you what I detect, and reassure you that it’s not like I’m thinking about it or talking about it or even noticing it all day everyday, either. I’m not, and I don’t; it’s not a big part of my experience of the South. But it is there IME, and with all due respect, none of you is in a position to tell me I’m wrong about that.
You’re not wrong about what you experienced – but you may be giving what you experienced too much weight. Here’s what I hope will be a helpful analogy:
Imagine that you can only see a single pixel of a television screen. Just one pixel – all the rest are covered up. Based on that one pixel, try to figure out exactly what television program is on.
Except I’m quite obviously not only seeing one pixel. I live here, and have for almost three years. I’m moving soon from one Southern state to another, and anticipate living down here for the foreseeable future. Look, you can try to minimize my experience if you want, though on what basis you could do so is beyond me. But I calls 'em like I sees 'em. I don’t know if I’m giving any one thing too much weight, though I kind of doubt it; but if I can’t even evaluate that myself, I think we can agree that you can’t, either.
What are these very different values you have from us ‘Yankees’?
Roland – this should have been the end of the thread right there. Well done.
As long as you give the individual Southerners you meet the benefit of the doubt, that’s all anyone can ask.
No doubt. However, there were, in a lot of places, the use of labor contracts and selective enforcement of the vagrancy laws, led to what was not much of an improvement in status for freed slaves. Here’s a copy of some of Mississippi’s 1865 “black code”
So, in other words, blacks, by law, had to enter into labor contracts, and if they tried to leave those contracts, they could be arrested and returned to their employers.
What does all this about chain gangs and labor contracts have to do with Southerners circa 2008? Why judge people who clearly had no part in that?
And if it is fair and right to look down on today’s Southerners (esp. for Gen Xers and younger) for things that happened before, when does that yoke get thrown off? Who decides?
It doesn’t. We’re hijacking.
Crap. I had half-expected you guys to offer up a justification. 
Thanks for shooting straight.
Politically, socially?
From the third grade thru high school I lived in a suburb of Atlanta, GA. I can remember seeing chain gangs. Those that I saw were all white, but that is not to say they were all white.
Besides my small community our high school consisted of kids from a Methodist Home, a shanty town of whites, farms and Scottdale Mills village. The biggest mill in Atlanta was Fulton Mills and their village was known as “Cabbage Town”, where you did not venture into. There were other well known “Milltowns” in Georgia at the time, such as Chicopee, Pepperell and Avondale mills. All had the little white houses for the workers, but I doubt they still got by with “company stores”. All these were mainly white. I know little or nothing about share-farmers, since then I was a city brat.
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Before moving to Atlanta, I lived on a farm between Dayton and Xenia, OH. When I moved to the South (in 1947), I got in trouble many times for being a “Yankee”. My dad asked about why I’d gotten into a fight and I said they called me a gD Yankee . He said I needed to decide if I wanted to stay a Yankee w/ or w/o the gD or become a southerner. That was a change in attitude and didn’t always work since any true southerner will tell you I’m still a Yankee. If you want to really please me say something about my southern accent, which doesn’t fool anyone in MS. I have been embarrassed many times with rednecks shooting off their mouths, but more often I’ve had to listen to dumb statements from my fellow Yankees. My suggestion is to not mention the Civil War Between the States and to consider the source of those that want to fight it again (southerners) and those that think the simple thing to do is to point out, “We won the war”